Question

Data Warehouse vs Data Base

Data base design, Data warehouse

What is the difference between a data base and a data warehouse?

All data warehouses are databases, not all databases are data warehouses.

Basically a database is any system which keeps data in a table format.

Here's the defination from wikipedia
"A computer database is a structured collection of records or data that is stored in a computer system so that a computer program or person using a query language can consult it to answer queries[1]. The records retrieved in answer to queries are information that can be used to make decisions."

A data warehouse is a specially setup database designed to hold large amounts of data for reporting purposes. While a normal database is optomized for transactional activity (while keeping a small amount of history) a data warehouse will be optomized for large scale reporting.

Within a data warehouse data from several systems will typically be merged together to present a global enterprise view. Data warehouses will also typically keep a very long history from several years to the entire life of the company so that very long term trends can be viewed.